Analyzing Optimal Marketing Strategies Over Customers' Networks

Abstract

In a costumers' network obtained, for example, from social networks, modeling influences among buyers is useful to estimate a buyer's decision to buy an item. This kind of influences is sometimes modeled with submodular functions and the problem of finding the marketing strategies to offer items to buyers that maximize the revenues of other buyers can be formulated as submodular maximization. In this paper, we address the problem of enumerating optimal and near-optimal solutions (strategies) to this problem and investigate numerically with real social network data.